What goes into an application

[onecatmore]

Name: Marja Virtanen
Pull-point: August 2015
Canon: Old World of Darkness / Mage: The Ascension
Age: 35

Comments

Important relationships

[onecatmore]

Anneli and Marja don't share everything; they have, in the end, quite a lot of separate areas and secrets from each other, due to what they are, and places important to them that they would never go to together. Perhaps it is that what protects their relationship from turning from tight to harmful. It certainly is what allowed them to grow into very close sisters that are still independent to a degree. There was a time when they were inseparable and impossible to tell apart, and the latter holds still true (unless you are able to tell apart a mage and a werewolf, or look for some very minor differences/were clued into who is who after they got dressed in the morning). And they still live together, raise Anneli's daughter together and are the most central person in each other's life, to the point where they will organize their own around the other. Marja has spent years of her life working to maintain a place in the human world for Anneli, and Anneli has repeatedly made decisions based on how to best keep Marja safe. They can let each other go, they can let each other do "their weird thing", knowing that those things are generally dangerous, but they will also do their best to keep each other updated on what they are doing so if something happens the other will at least have a clue as to what happened. They say it is to make sure that Kaisa is cared for, but really that's only half the truth. Perhaps a bit of Marja's lack of self-preservation is based on being aware of Anneli's auspice not usually coming with the greatest life expectancy.

Kaisa, continuing from above, is the person in Marja's life whom Marja feels the need to protect - the kid might be bright for her age, but unlike the other people important in her life, Kaisa is just a regular human, and a child on top. She will come to the aid of everyone else, too, but with Kaisa she'll take preventive measures. Kaisa is also what can hold her back from making dumb decisions, because she is the one who would suffer the most if Marja got herself into serious trouble. All that aside, Kaisa is like a daughter to her, and she's doing her best to raise an independent, confident child by mostly letting her run free, being consequent where it is necessary and supporting her when needed. And, of course, trying to impart at least some of how her and Anneli see the world to her, wrapped up as religion and tradition.

Robert is a Verbena and the only other mage that she has done a lot of things with. He is about her age, from Scotland, and... well, Verbena and Dreamspeakers tend to get along well because the way in which they approach the world tends to be two friendly sides of a coin, spirit and flesh. And they have a similar worldview outside of that, too. So more often than not, they would look at each other over the rest of the group and shake their heads, or just go off and do their own thing by themselves. Robert is the closest to a friend that she has right now, and she's been trying to help him settle down in the area half because he seemed to want to and half because she'd like him to stay.

And then there's Barbara. She belongs to the group of Hollow Ones running the guild house in Nuremberg, also is roughly Marja's age and has been a steady presence around, someone whom Marja got along with from the beginning and through some trials and tribulations started to care about more and more - kind of volunteering for the same cause, to keep the guild house intact, just running into one another more often, rolling your eyes at the same people... Both of loving cats a lot... Well, and then it turned out (in the context of Barbara making a really bad one-night-stand choice) that Barbara was into women. And Marja realized quite abruptly that she was harbouring a fairly significant crush. They've slowly gotten closer ever since.